The SMOM is an elite Roman Catholic Knighthood headed by a Grandmaster who works at the behest of the Pope. Membership is derived from Politics, Industry, Finance, Military, Intelligence, Media and Entertainment. Knights and Dames first swear loyalty to the Pope and then to their country. "Defending the faith" and helping fellow members while serving the Order constitutes their ethics.

Junio Valerio Borghese was born in Rome into the wealthy Borghese noble family, and educated in London and from 1923 at the Royal Italian Navy Academy (Accademia Navale) in Livorno.

In 1929 his naval career began, and by 1933 he was a submarine commander. He took part in the Ethiopian War and during the Spanish Civil War was in command of the Italian submarine Iride.

At the start of the Second World War he took command of the submarine Pisani, and in August 1940 was in command of the submarine Scir?, which was modified to carry the new secret Italian weapon, the human torpedo. Known as a SLCs (siluri a lenta corsa - slow speed torpedoes), and nicknamed maiali (pigs), these were small underwater assault vehicles with a crew of two. In September 1941 Borghese managed to enter Gibraltar harbour to launch the human torpedos on a raid which damaged three ships. On 18 December 1941, he reached Alexandria and launched three SLCs that damaged the Royal Navy battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth, and the tanker Sagona.

In 1942 J. Valerio Borghese took command of the elite naval sabotage unit of the Italian Navy, which included surface assault craft, human torpedoes, midget submarines and SCUBA assault swimmers. This unit, known as the Decima Flottiglia MAS, or X-MAS, saw active service in the Mediterranean and pioneered new techniques of commando assault warfare, commanding the admiration of Italians and the respect of the Royal Navy.

Following the surrender of Italy on 8 September 1943, Decima Flottiglia was disbanded, and some of its sailors joined the Allied cause to fight against Germany. Borghese chose to ally himself with the fascist Italian Social Republic and continue fighting alongside the German armed forces, and on 12 September 1943 he signed a treaty of alliance with the German Navy. Many of his colleagues volunteered to serve with him, and the Decima Flottiglia was revived, headquartered in the Palazzo Fantoni in Salo. By the end of the war it had over 18,000 members, and although Borghese conceived it as a purely military unit, it gained a reputation as a savage pro-fascist, anti-communist, anti-resistance force in land campaigns alongside the German army, under the command of SS General Wolff.

At the end of the war Borghese was arrested by partisans, but rescued by OSS officer James Angleton, who dressed him up in an American uniform and drove him to Rome for interrogation by the Allies. Borghese was tried and convicted of war crimes, sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, but released from jail by the Italian Supreme Court in 1949.

With his record as a war hero and his support of fascism, he became a figurehead for pro-fascist, anti-communist groups in the immediate post-war period, acquiring the nickname Black Prince. He was associated with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-Fascist party formed in the post-World War II period by supporters of the executed dictator Benito Mussolini, and its successor the Fronte Nazionale.

Borghese's name is also linked with plots by the CIA to promote fascism in post-war Italy as a means of combating communism.

Latterly regarded as a political outcast, Junio Valerio Borghese died in Cadiz in 1974.

He wrote a popular memoir of his wartime exploits, published as "Sea Devils" in 1954.

Meanwhile, James Jesus Angleton, who would later become the CIA's controversial director of counterintelligence, was dispatched by admiral Ellery Stone, U.S. proconsul in occupied Italy, to rescue Prince Valerio Borghese from possible arrest by the Italian Resistance, which had sentenced him to death for war crimes. Borghese, who survived to be a leader in Italy's postwar fascist politics, was a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honor and Devotion of SMOM, and in gratitude for U.S. services to him and other Knights, SMOM gave Stone, Angleton and Angelton's deputy its Grand Cross award. Other recipients of the coveted award were Reinhard Gehlen and Truman's Vatican envoy, Myron C. Taylor.

The career of the Roman "Black Prince," Junio Valerio Borghese, gruesomely illustrates how virtually all modern "international terrorism" and all assassinations of heads of state and government such as President John F. Kennedy, former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, or the numerous attempts on France's President Charles de Gaulle, derive from the postwar Nazi International, sponsored by the Anglo-American-led Synarchy and its intelligence services. To trace all the ramifications of that career, is to open a door onto the centuries-old highest level of the financial oligarchy—the Synarchy: the aristocratic families of the "black nobility," the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, and the heirs of what Pope John Paul I called the "ancients" of Venice.

The fascist Borghese founded Mussolini's elite naval warfare squadron, which he turned into a savage irregular warfare unit in northern Italy by the end of World War II. Picked up by Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and other anti-Franklin Delano Roosevelt operatives of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Borghese and his men would be involved in every major postwar coup attempt or terrorist outbreak in Italy until 1970, when he fled to Spain after the failed coup attempt most closely associated with his name. From Italy, and then while in Spain, he maintained connections all over Europe and with the bloody Operation Condor torture-and-murder syndicate in Ibero-America. An examination of Borghese's career enables one to peer beneath the surface of terrorism and spectacular assassinations, into the netherworld whence these actions are launched: where international high finance; ancient aristocratic families; pro-fascist elements of the Curia of the Catholic Church; leading fascists of the Hitler-Mussolini era; and the Anglo-American intelligence services, in particular those of NATO, are all unified in a war against the modern nation-state.

The British and U.S. intelligence services' files on Borghese are still classified, as are the Borghese family archives in the Vatican after 1922, when Mussolini seized power. The present book is the first biography of Borghese in English. When correlated with other recent exposés of Gladio, the post-World War II NATO "stay-behind" network in Europe, and when all are situated within the work of Lyndon LaRouche and his associates on the Synarchy, it is a notable contribution to unmasking international terrorism, though the book's authors are perhaps not always aware of the full implications of what they present.[1]

Borghese belonged to a principal family of Rome's ostensibly Catholic "black nobility," many members of which claim descent from the elite of the Roman Empire. Numerous Popes and cardinals came from the Borghese and allied families, such as the Pallavicini, the Colonna, and the Orsini; these families maintained enormous power into the 20th Century, and still today, in the Curia, the administration of the Vatican. Their faction within the Church helped construct the infamous "rat-line"—run, in part, through monasteries and convents—which spirited thousands of Fascists and Nazis out of Europe after the war, into Ibero-America, Asia, and the Middle East.

[...]

Essential to Angleton's activities, to the establishment of the first stay-behind units in Italy, and to the organization of the Vatican-linked "rat-lines" which smuggled fascists out of Europe at war's end, was the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). The Rome-based SMOM was a nominally Catholic organization with membership drawn from the highest ranks of the European oligarchy, in particular Italy's black nobility. The SMOM awarded Angleton one of its highest decorations in 1946. A member of the "Black Prince's" family, S. Giacomo, Prince Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honor of Devotion in the SMOM since 1932, while P2 founder Licio Gelli and several of his top members, including secret service heads, also belonged.

The collapse of the communist states in the East caused many in the West to query the further need for NATO. It is now evident that this query was based on two grave misconceptions: 1) the NATO had been set up solely to resist Soviet expansion, and 2) that the collapse of the latter had meant the end of the marxist ideal. Had this been so, logic would have decreed immediate redundancy for NATO! By the very nature of it’s conception in April 1949, NATO operates under American patronage and hegemony. Patronage, as attested to under its Article 3 whereby $25 billion of military aid was given to its partners by the US in the first twenty years only of its existence hegemony, as attested to by a glance at NATO's command structure which reveals that, of its three 'commands' -SAFEUR or SHAPE (covering Europe), SACLANT (the Atlantic) and CINCHAN (the Channel) - the first two named, the crucial areas, can be under only American command (Eisenhower, Haig, etc).

NATO's true role since its formation has been to act as a counter-revolutionary, counter-reformist arm of the Corporate West. This was clarified by no less a person than George Kennan (once again) when he stated that, when NATO was formed, the State department considered ".the communist danger in its most threatening form as an internal problem - that is, of western society" - and if anybody should have known it was he. This was a statement, moreover, that conformed precisely - and understandably - to the tenets of corporate America. This now calls for a closer look at NATO's Article 9, which empowered the setting up of subsidiary bodies, such as civilian institutes, military staff and other such. The fact the GLADIO is such a 'subsidiary body' is enough to cause unease. GLADIO (aka GLAIVE, aka ZWAARD) is a secret anti-Left terrorist group set up by the Clandestine Planning Committee of SHAPE in 1959. Recent judicial investigations into political corruption in Italy have unearthed evidence linking GLADIO to post-war terrorist acts in that country (such as the Bologna bombing). One such act - though an abortive one - was the attempted coup d'etat in 1970 led by Prince Valerio Borghese and his neo-fascist protégé Stephano delle Chiaie - a known terrorist. Borghese, a fascist and naval commander in the war, had been sentenced to death for war crimes by the Italian Resistance at war's end, but rescued by James Jesus Angleton, who headed the OSS-controlled American/British Special Counter-Intelligence Team, SCI-Z, then operating in Italy (Angleton later became head of CIA Counter-Intelligence, and throughout his career retained exclusive control over CIA liaison with the Vatican). Borghese, for his part, played a leading role in post-war fascist politics, and was a Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour and Devotion in the SMOM.

10. Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy Magazine, 1984), at p.6. One member of the family, S.E. Don Giangiacomo, Principe Borghese, had been a Bailiff Grand Cross Of Honor and Devotion of SMOM since June 4,1932. Christie's book includes a photo of Borghese driven by an unidentified SS officer in 1944, with the caption, ``Borghese was then [1944] head of 'XMAS' (Decima MAS), a special forces corps of 4,000 men founded in 1941. Borghese assumed command after the Italian armistice and XMAS was officially recognized by the Nazi High Command on September 14, 1943. Under his direction, XMAS was responsible for the torture and mass murder of Italian partisans. Ibid., p. 7; see also Laurent, op. cit., n.9.